Restructuring Europe
Centre formation, system building
and political structuring between the
nation-state and the European Union
STEFANO BARTOLINI
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
ß Stefano Bartolini 2005
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available
Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India. Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk. ISBN 0-19-928643-4 978-019-928643-0
Von Kreaturen, die wir machten Goethe, Faust
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
The preparation of this book has been greatly helped by the financial support offered by the Research Council of the European University Institute in Florence during 2000–4, and it has profited from the research assistance of Guido Legnante and Goran von Sidow. The book could not have appeared without the careful English language editing by Nicola Owtram, and without the continuous help offered by Elisabeth Webb. The anonymous reviewers of the manuscript presented me with an extensive set of corrections of factual mistakes and with lots of suggestions for improving the presentation of the argument, and for this also I am grateful.
I have presented preliminary versions and parts of the content of this work in many conferences, papers and seminars—so many that I now can hardly remember all those to whom I am indebted. I want to thank Adrienne He´ritier, Hanspeter Kriesi, Maurizio Ferrera, Philippe Schmitter, Thomas Risse, Peter Flora, Vivien Schmidt, Peter Mair, Colin Crouch, and Fritz Sharpf, to whom I have so often listened, and with whom I have so often exchanged views about the EU. Although I have learned much from all of these various colleagues, there are nevertheless two in particular who deserve a special word of gratitude: Adrienne He´ritier, who has helped me intensely during the preparation of this work and who has worked harder on the draft manuscript than could have been expected of any colleague—in fact, only real friends can offer this sort of help to you; and Maurizio Ferrera, with whom I had numerous intellectual exchanges about Rokkan’s and Hirsch-man’s work while we were both drafting manuscripts on the EU, and who has proved a constant source of inspiration and reflection.
This book would not exist without the ‘people’ of the European University Institute in Florence—all of them, the students and the administrative staff, the colleagues and the many visitors. Without this unique environment, my interest for the EU would not have emerged, and my scepticism about its development would not be forced to confront the rigours of academic work.
P R E F A C E
Given the difficulty of defining the EU as a political formation, and given the virtually unanimous opinion that the EU is not a ‘state’, the literature tends to use a variety of different terms. Some see the EU as a classic ‘confeder-ation’, while some feel the need to specify this further by adding the label of ‘consociationalism’. Other scholars define the EU as a ‘political system’, while yet others prefer to classify it as a ‘regime’. There are scholars who prefer to stress the opposition between ‘government’ and ‘governance’, while among those who do use the term ‘state’, various caveats are added to suggest that it is a special type of state—a ‘policymaking state’ or a ‘regulatory state’. Finally, there are those who resort to the term ‘system’, speaking of ‘a system of multilevel governance’ or of ‘a system of liberal intergovernmentalism’. One particular scholar who coins neologisms with great creativity defines it as ‘post-sovereign, polycentric, incongruent and neo-medieval’.1Yet, despite its variety, this list is clearly incomplete, and leaves aside the most daring of these conceptual combinations.
As well as the multiplicity of definitions, there is also a multiplicity of approaches. If we focus on the institutions of the EU, European integration can be seen as involving the growth of the competences and powers of a new layer of government whose directives and regulations may replace, change,
1
Respectively by Warleigh, W., ‘Better the Evil You Know? Synthetic and Confederal Understandings of European Unification’, West European Politics, 21 (1994), 1–18; Chrys-sochoou, D. N., ‘Democracy and Symbiosis in the European Union: Towards a Confederal Consociation?’, West European Politics, 17 (1994), 1–14; Bogaards, M., ‘Con-sociational Interpretations of the EU: A Critical Appraisal’, European Union Politics, 3 (2002), 357–81; Hix, S., The Political System of the European Union (Basingstoke: Mac-millan, 1999); Breckenridge, R. E., ‘Reassessing Regimes: The International Regime Aspects of the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 35 (1997), 173–87; Eising, R. and Kohler-Koch, B., ‘Introduction: Network Governance in the European Union’; and Kohler-Koch, B., ‘The Evolution and Transformation of European Govern-ance’, in B. Kohler-Koch and Eising, R. (eds.), The Transformation of Governance in the European Union (London: Routledge, 1999), 3–13 and 14–35; Richardson, J., ‘Policy-making in the EU: Interests, Ideas and Garbage Cans of Primeval Soup’, in J. Richardson (ed.), European Union: Power and Policy-making (London: Routledge, 1996), 3–23; Majone, G., ‘The Rise of the Regulatory State in Europe’, West European Politics, 17 (1994), 77–101; Marks, G., Hooghe, L. and Blank, K. ‘European Integration from the 1980s: State Centric v. Multi-level Governance’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 34 (1996), 341–78; Moravcsik, A., The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (London: UCL Press, 1998); Schmitter, P., ‘Imagining the Future of the Euro-Polity with the Help of New Concepts’, in G. Marks et al., Governance in the European Union (London: Sage, 1996), 121–50.
or complement national laws; or as the emergence of a set of political institutions that formalize and routinize interactions among actors; or as the growth of policy networks specializing in the creation of authoritative European rules; or as a gigantic coordination game among different kinds of actors to regulate the negative externalities of an enlarged area of free trade and market interactions. If we focus on the constitutive components of the Union—the nation-states—then integration can be conceptualized as a pro-cess of internalization of new and previously environmental inputs; as the adaptation of national institutions and regimes, and of national routine patterns of conflict resolution, competition and mediation to EU-level changes and to a new environment. If we focus instead on the actors, European integration can be seen as a major change in their institutional opportunity structure; as a growing horizontal interaction between cross-border firms, citizens, networks of experts and lobbyists, and the like; or as a convergence process through which formal and informal behaviour and values are becoming increasingly similar to one another.
This is obviously a rich and complex set of definitions and perspectives, and one which will be filled out even further with this particular book. In this study, I focus on the historical configuration of territorial borders and func-tional boundaries of the European nation-state, and I present integration as a process of territorial and functional boundary transcendence, redefin-ition, shift, and change that fundamentally alters the nature of the European states. Broadening the perspective even further, I see integration as a new historical phase in the development of Europe, characterized by a powerful trend towards legal, economic, and cultural territorial de-differentiation that follows after a five-century long process of differentiation that led to the territorial structuring of the European system of nation-states. The core concern of this study is the relationship between the specific institutional design of the new Brussels centre of territorial integration (as it stands roughly at the time of the Nice Treaty),2the boundary redefinitions that result from the political production of this new centre, and, finally, the consequences of both of these processes on the already established national and the newly developing European political structures. Although my interest in European
2 The ‘Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe’ (TCE) was elaborated by the
European Convention (18 July 2003), approved by the European Council (17–18 June 2004) and signed by the Head of States (29 October 2004) while this book was drafted. It is now in the ratification process by all member states following their national prescribed procedures. The final approval is uncertain. There are many institutional innovations in the TCE, but most of them do not significantly alter the key features of the EU, particularly when these are seen in a rather long term developmental perspective as it is done in this work. Reference to the TCE will therefore be limited to the most relevant prospects of change (such as, for instance, the Chart of Fundamental Rights included in Part II of the Treaty).
integration is of relatively recent origin, it is nevertheless closely connected with my previous work, which was mainly devoted to the historical configur-ation of nconfigur-ational cleavages as specific political structures articulating voice within the closed territorial entities of the European nation-states. If the EU can be seen as a process of boundary redefinition, is it almost inevitable that we ask about the implications for the historical forms of articulation of national voice.
Taking the EU as a case of the formation of an enlarged territorial system, this work recovers some of the central and classic issues of political modern-ization theory. Three questions in particular lie at the core of this work.3 First, is the EU an attempt at state formation? The EU is often depicted as a novelty that departs so radically from previous forms of political organization that very little—if anything at all—can be learned from previous historical models of large-scale territorial enlargement/integration and retrenchment/ differentiation. In sharp contrast with this view, I argue that a great deal can be learned about the EU and its future development, about its mode of structuring and about the kind of problematic pressures it is subject to, by looking at past experiences of large-scale territorial formations. The EU has not developed through war or through the acquisition of territory, but to the extent that supranational powers have accumulated and functional transfers can already be seen, it can be defined as a state-formation attempt that is characterized to date by limited administrative capabilities, by strong regula-tory powers in selected fields, by very weak fiscal capabilities, and by strong juridical capabilities that have grown from the early spheres of competences. From the historical point of view, there is nothing exceptional or new in this configuration of subsystemic differentiation. Even if the configuration is not structurally stable and the final outcomes are as yet far from clear, past experiences may help to conceptualize the problems arising from it. It is claimed here, on the one hand, that interesting insights can be gained by locating EU integration within the broader scheme of European develop-ment that has lasted from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the formation of modern states; and, on the other, that this new expansion in the range and scope of cross-territorial communication can only properly be understood against the background of the territorial, cultural, economic, and adminis-trative differentiation brought about by the emergence of a system of states. Throughout this book I use the concept of centre formation as a more general category than state formation (or state building). The formation of states was the formation of a particular type of centre, but there have been and there might still be different types of ‘centres’. In short, the question is not whether
3 See Flora, P., ‘The National Welfare State and European Integration’, in L. Moreno
the EU is a ‘state’, but rather whether its development can be fruitfully interpreted with the analytical categories of the ‘centre formation’ process, once those categories are adapted and separated from the historical experi-ence of the ‘state formation’.
Second, is the EU an attempt at centre formation without nation building? The concept of ‘state’ is often equated with that of ‘nation-state’, and the connotation characterizing the term ‘nation’ is often added implicitly to that of the state. It is difficult to dispute that the EU is not a nation-state. However, this does not rule out the investigation of the kind of relationships that can exist between a non-nation-state and its constitutive nations, in that states have existed which were not nation-states. Reminding ourselves of how European cultural boundaries came to be defined in relation to military, politico-administrative, and economic boundaries may help to clear up some of the questions surrounding the historical sequence and relationship between demos, telos, and kratos. Once again, the original question needs to be reformulated. The issue is not whether integration rests on, builds, or even requires a ‘nation’, but rather the more general question as to whether the EU is developing those features that force its components to stay within it beyond the ‘contractual’ agreements based on mere instrumental calcula-tions, and, of course, without resorting to force. In other words, the issue is whether the EU is producing ‘loyalty’, which I interpret to be those structures and processes of system maintenance represented by cultural integration, social sharing institutions, and participation rights. This aspect is identified in this work with the concept of system building, as opposed to ‘centre formation’. In this respect, the core argument of the book is that for any new centre a balance must exist between its system building capacity and the scope and reach of its political production, and that the ambitious political production of the EU centre is clearly out of balance with its weak system building capacity.
Third, is the EU a process of centre formation without democratization? Conflicts, opposition formation and institutional democratization have taken place within territorially consolidated states and have rested on a sense of cultural ‘nationalization’. Closer consideration of past ‘democra-tization processes’ may help to clarify our ideas about the requirements, limits and possibilities of the internal democratization on the EU. However, before dealing with questions of institutional democratization, we need to conceptualize the forms of interest differentiation, the corresponding conflict lines, and the resulting political oppositions and alliances among individuals, collectivities, membership organizations, territories, corporate groups, and bureaucracies that are stimulated by the integration process itself. This means concentrating on the more deeply rooted process of institutionaliza-tion of conflict lines within the newly devised boundaries and borders of the
EU, so as to understand how they relate to national conflict lines, and which political structures can be created at the new level. I use the general concept of political structuring to identify this process, which is analytically distinct from both centre formation and system building processes. My argument through the book is that institutional democratization without political structuring may turn into fac¸ade electioneering, at best, or dangerous experi-ments, at worst.
Centre formation, system building, and political structuring are the three key conceptual tools that I use to interpret the EU. To apply them fruitfully requires, however, a considerable reworking of each. This book, in fact, is not based on original empirical research and relies on secondary literature; it also focuses more on general trends than on systematic cross-country vari-ations. But it also has the theoretical ambition to sharpen the conceptual tools that are currently available to deal with processes of territorial enlarge-ment and unification. The integration literature has produced many studies focusing on the explanation of specific sectoral outcomes. These sectoral theories are then generally evaluated with reference to the theories of supra-nationalism/neofunctionalism, on the one hand, and realism/intergovern-mentalism, on the other. It is likely that not enough attention has been given to macro-level theorizing regarding the systemic significance of these subsystem developments, and the general constellation in which they take on their meaning and show their potential implications for the broader problems of social and systemic integration.
We lack a general theoretical framework for political structuring beyond the nation-state which is capable of linking the various aspects of EU integration—the persistent intergovernmentalism, the unbalanced definition of rights, the odd ‘constitutionalization’ of its treaties, the tensions between the need for legitimacy of the new territorial hierarchy and the nation-states, and so on. To use a term that is now largely discredited, we need a ‘holistic’ approach to integration in the form of a theory that gives us an idea of the whole model, and from which hypotheses can be generated, even if it is not possible to test all of its components. This theoretical framework needs (a) to overcome the rigid distinction between domestic politics and international relations; (b) to link actors’ orientations, interests and motivations with macro outcomes; and (c) to relate structural profiles with dynamic processes of change.
The interpretation of the integration process needs to combine domestic relations within countries with international relations among countries. Before the formation of the European system of states, the neat distinction between domestic politics and international relations did not exist; indeed, the distinction came about as a result of this process. That is to say, a clear-cut separation between the ‘external relations’ of a territorial unit and its internal
role differentiation and political dynamics is the contingent historical result of a specific configuration of the unit’s boundaries. It comes into being when an internal hierarchical order manages to control the external territorial and functional boundaries so closely that it insulates domestic structuring processes from external influences. In this case, the internal hierarchy presents itself as the single organizing principle of the internal domestic structuring and, at the same time, as the single autonomous centre for external relations. Any deviation from this pure type makes the distinction between ‘inter-national’ and ‘domestic’ politics of limited use, and sometimes renders it misleading. The deviation is obvious and macroscopic for advanced regional integration projects like the EU, in which boundaries between the internal developments and external relations of the states no longer exist in certain areas, or have become very loose in others, or are still closed and monitored in yet others. To the extent that both international relations and comparative politics theories rest on the ‘reification’ of the single political unit—either as a unified set of external preferences and interactions, or as an independent set of internal structures and developments—they are both challenged by issues of territorial and functional boundary redefinition.
The theory we need for the study of territorial system retrenchment and enlargement should also provide a micro and macro framework, linking the individual actor’s options and choices to aggregate outcomes, as well as a structure and dynamics framework, linking structural profiles and dynamic processes. These links should be capable of generating hypotheses and sce-narios about the variations in territorial groups and membership group responses to the integration process. At any given time, key individual and collective actors’ preferences/values/interests can be identified and the set of institutions or rules constraining their options can be studied. Each choice decision, or each single outcome may, therefore, be rationalized in terms of a game equilibrium or of a specific structural profile. Over time, dynamic processes are characterized by the emergence of new actors who have not participated in the earlier ‘games’, by changes in actors’ preferences, or by new institutional arrangements which all produce unintended and unex-pected consequences. These consequences then continuously modify the relevant actors, their preferences, and their institutional constraints. In the long run, then, it is hard to explain a dynamic process of development by a consecutive set of structural profiles and individual choices, even if at each moment they result in new structural profiles.
In order to sketch the components of a theory with these requirements I build on the work of Stein Rokkan and Albert Hirschman, with both being approached in the light of Weber’s insights into the relationship between the external consolidation and internal role differentiation of every ‘political formation’. Neither Hirschman nor Rokkan has dealt with European
inte-gration. Rokkan does not mention it in his work, which focuses on the cosmos of nation-states in Europe, including the historically failed as well as the successful examples. Hirschman does not extend his exit-voice-loyalty framework outside or beyond the capsule of the nation-state. The work of both these authors therefore needs to ‘travel to Brussels’—or at least be transported there. I maintain that this is a profitable exercise. Rokkan’s theory provides a macro interpretation of the formation of modern states and nations in Europe since the sixteenth century, while Hirschman’s ‘exit-voice’ paradigm provides a micro theory of individual actor’s choices under different conditions of confinement. That is, Hirschman’s exploration of exit and voice represents a micro-level theory of individual actors choices in relation to the quality of output in bounded territories, while Rokkan’s enquiry constitutes a macro-level historical developmental theory of actors/ resources reactions to territorial confinement. In the work of both these two scholars there is a consistent set of key concepts and concerns, as well as an implicit theoretical framework that can be exploited to move beyond the crisis of the nation-state.
To argue that the theoretical framework developed in this book meets these demanding requirements would be immodest. Instead, it is hoped that this is a work that moves in this direction, and that represents a push for European studies to become more rooted in general theories of politics and to acquire a more developmental perspective.
Chapter 1 of this book is largely analytical and sketches the elements of a theory of voice structuring under different conditions of the territorial confinement of actors and resources. It formulates theoretical propositions about how processes of internal conflict generation and opposition develop-ment (‘political structuring’) relate to the processes of boundary demarcation in a large-scale territorial polity, and how the two relate to the internal institutional hierarchy of the same territory.
In Chapter 2 this analytical framework is used to review the history of state formation in Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The purpose is to interpret the specific historical configuration of the boundaries of the European nation-state and then to explain variations in the forms of centre–periphery structuring, interest intermediation structuring, and cleavage structuring.
From Chapter 3 onwards the book investigates the extent to which the analytical framework and the historical reconstruction of the nation-state experience can be fruitfully extended to the interpretation of the fifty-year-long development of the integration process. Chapter 3 interprets the EU as the formation of a new centre and focuses on the peculiarities of its institutional design.
Chapter 4 analyses how the political production of this new centre impacts on the traditional configuration of boundaries of the nation-states. The activities and the political production of the EU are also interpreted in their capacity of system building.
Chapters 5 and 6 then move on to analyse the implications of the process of boundary redrawing for the different types of actors and resources active in the territorial, corporate and political-electoral channels of representation. These chapters discuss both the consequences for established national poli-tical structures and the prospects of the development of new, European-wide political structures.
Finally, Chapter 7 recalls the trajectory of the analytical model and of the historical interpretation, discussing the implications of the peculiar model of centre formation, system building, and political structuring prevalent at the EU level to date.
In studying European integration, we retrace the ruins of previous at-tempts to integrate this part of the world. The half-a-century-long process of new large-scale territorial integration is characterized by the progressive lowering of internal boundaries and the slow rise of new external boundaries. The process liberates conflicting and contradictory energies and requests for exit and, at the same time, new demands for closure. Which specific systemic boundaries are lowered internally and which are raised externally is, and will be, of paramount importance for the internal forms of voice structuring and institutional differentiation. As usual, the specificity of the process that is unfolding before our eyes seems so complex and momentous as to defeat any comparison with previous historical phenomena of the same genus. And yet the entire history of Europe—from the consolidation of the Roman Empire to its fall, from feudalization to the birth of communal civilization, from the establishment of the common Latin intellectual language to the vernacular-ization of communication (and back to a common new language?); from the development of an early universalistic legal grammar to the nationalization of law and back to its ‘Europeanization’; from the original kinship ties to the Christian cross-territorial community and back to the religious membership retrenchment of Orthodox and Protestant reforms—is a continuous process of geographical and membership space retrenchment/differentiation and expansion/integration. I find it fascinating to view the richness of this history through the prisms of ‘exit option’, ‘boundary building’ and ‘political struc-turing’, and I find it just as fascinating to interpret the much more recent process of European integration with these same intellectual tools.
C O N T E N T S
List of Figures xxiii
List of Tables xxiv
List of Abbreviations xxvi
1. A Theory of Exit Options, Boundary Building, and
Political Structuring 1
Introduction 1
Exit 4
Boundary 12
Hierarchy and centre formation 24
Loyalty and system building 31
Voice and political structuring 36
Exit/entry, boundary building and political structuring 47
Conclusions: the micro–macro framework 53
2. Structuring Europe: the Experience of the ‘Nation-State’ 56 Introduction: large-scale territorial differentiation
and retrenchment 56
State building (Force–coercion) 60
Capitalism development (Economy) 71
Nation building (Cultural retrenchment/expansion) 81
Democratization 89
Social sharing 104
Conclusions: the political structuring of the
European nation-state 109
3. Centre Formation in the European Union 116
The historical constellation 116
Centre formation 122
Territorial expansion and weak territoriality 127
Competence accretion 132
Bureaucratic development 136
Centrally administered legal system 141
Unusual ‘constitutionalization’ 160
Uncertain legitimation 165
Conclusions 175
4. The Political Production of EU: Boundary Building and
Boundary Removing 177
Introduction: negative and positive integration versus
boundary building and removing 177
The economic boundary 179
The coercion boundary 199
System building: cultural identity, political rights and social
sharing 211
Conclusions: the boundary configuration of the EU 241
5. Political Structuring in Loosely Bounded Territories:
Territorial and Corporate Structures 248
Introduction: three structures of political representation:
territorial, corporate, and electoral 248
Centre–periphery structures 252
Corporate Structures 281
6. Electoral Representation in Loosely Bounded Territories:
Mass Politics in the EU? 309
The background of electoral instability and the impact
of European integration 310
National parties’ attitudes toward the EU: ‘geopolitical’,
‘partisan’, ‘genetic’ and ‘institutional’ models 321
The multilevel party system 326
Europarties and the mass public 340
Conclusions: electoral representation between national
and European arenas 354
7. Restructuring Europe 363
European integration in historical perspective: the sixth developmental process of the
European integration in analytical perspective: the macro and micro consequences
of boundary transcendence 376
The political destructuring of the nation-state 380
Political restructuring of the Union? 386
Conclusions: democratizing without political structuring? 405
L I S T O F F I G U R E S
1.1. External boundary demarcation and internal
political structuring 3
1.2. Characteristics of boundaries 21
1.3. Costs of exit and voice in governmental arenas 51 1.4. Political production, boundary building and exit options 52 2.1. A map of political structuring variations in
socio-political inputs 101
2.2. Capital constraining alliance within the democratic nation-state 110 2.3. The analytical triangles of ‘nation-state’ political structuring 113
3.1. The framework of analysis by chapter 117
4.1. Thickness and inclusiveness of cultural identities 218 5.1. Sources of variation in territorial opportunity structures 279 5.2. A map of substate territories’ structures of opportunity 281
6.1. Party/voters fit in issue position 344
7.1. The six developmental trends in European history since
the sixteenth century 366
L I S T O F T A B L E S
1.1. Types of exit and consequences 7
1.2. Exits within, outside, and across territories 10
1.3. Types of territorial boundaries 18
1.4. Exit options and boundary building 20
1.5. Socio-political inputs and institutional threshold of
political structuring 49
1.6. The micro–macro concepts 54
2.1. Modalities of state formation in Europe 71
2.2. Stateness, economic interest differentiation, institutional
democratization, and voice repression 93
2.3. A map of political structuring variations by channels 100 2.4. A map of political structuring variations in
cultural-territorial outcomes 102
2.5. A map of political structuring variations in
organizational forms 103
3.1. Territorial and population expansion 128
3.2. Legitimacy sources for decisions under no exit option
and no unanimity requirement 173
4.1. Types of definition of the national membership group 215
4.2. Overall structural funds 231
5.1. Fit between EU and national interest
intermediation patterns 294
5.2. Interest groups’ strategies according to levels and
types of decision-making 305
5.3. The impact of integration and national groups’
identities/interests 307
6.1. Mean levels of electoral participation, electoral
volatility, and vote for new parties 312
6.2. Predominant issues, arenas and types of party
system structuring 356
6.3. Impact of European integration on national
electoral representation: synthetic summary 359 7.1. Behavioural options in closed nation-states versus
7.2. The destructuring of the nation-state 383 7.3. Nation-state and EU political structuring 388 7.4. A comparison of the nation-state and the EU 396 7.5. Conflict lines of the main phases of European
L I S T O F A B B R E V I A T I O N S
AEBR Association of European Border Regions AER Assembly of European Regions
ASEAN Association of South East Asian Nations CAP Common Agricultural Policy
CCRE Conseil des communes et des re´gions d’Europe CEDRE European Centre for Regional Development CFI Court of First Instance
CFSP Common Energy Policy
C-SIS Central Schengen Information System ECB European Central Bank
ECJ European Court of Justice
ECSC European Coal and Steel Community ECU European Currency Unit
EDC European Defence Community EEA European Economic Area EEC European Economic Community EEP Experience Exchange Programme EMS European Monetary System EP European Parliament
EPC European Political Cooperation EPU European Payment Union
ERDF European Regional Development Fund ERIT European Regions of Industrial Tradition ETUC European Trade Union Congress
EU European Union
FAO Food and Agricultural Organization GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GD General Directorates
IEM Internal Energy Market IGC Intergovernmental Conferences IMP Integrated Mediterranean Programmes N-SIS National Schengen Information System NUTS Nomenclature of Territorial Units of Statistics
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development QMV Qualified Majority Voting
SEA Single European Act
TABD Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue
TCE Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe TEC/EC Treaty of European Community
TEU Treaty of the European Union VAT Value Added Tax
WEU Western European Union WTO World Trade Organization
1
A Theory of Exit Options, Boundary
Building, and Political Structuring
Introduction
When referring to the modern form of the state, it is usual to recall the threefold Weberian definition of any political formation, where this is con-ceived as a (a) hierarchically structured organization for the maintenance of order; (b) within a defined geographical area; and (c) through the use and the threat of physical coercion.1 This definition emphasizes the features of a bounded space, of an internally organized community, and of external strategies of demarcation through signals of possession or through physical defence against intruders. The Weberian formulation establishes a link be-tween the strategies of demarcation of the external boundaries of the geo-graphical space, on the one hand, and the differentiation of roles in the internal organization of the population occupying the space, on the other. On this view, the ‘external territorial control’ refers to the distinctions and differences in membership rights, privileges and obligations between natives and foreigners that are set up through the building of various kinds of boundaries, while ‘internal political structure’ refers to the institutional form and the legitimation principle of the relationship between rulers and their subjects.
The history of human organizations can be read as a series of repeated attempts to create territorial borders that correspond and coincide with systemic functional boundaries and which are in line with the consolidated socio-political hierarchies within the corresponding populations.2This same
1
Weber, M., Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 2 vols. (Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1956 (1922)), 29–30. Throughout this book I will use the term ‘political formation’ to translate Weber’s concept of politische verba¨nde as I find the English translation of this concept as ‘political group’ inadequate and misleading.
2
Rokkan, S., Urwin, D., Aerebrot, F. H., Malaba, P., and Sande, T., Centre-Periphery Structures in Europe (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1987), 17–18.
history can also be interpreted as the way in which political hierarchies have been shaped, reinforced, shaken, or destroyed by the success or lack of it in similar repeated attempts to limit the opportunities to transcend those same boundaries. Modern state making was a form of such a process, the success of which has led to its generalized imitation. The idea that the links between external territorial consolidation of a polity and its internal political struc-turing are significant is far from new. Indeed, it has a remarkable pedigree in political theory and historical research. Erasmus noted that: ‘I am loth to suspect here what only too often, alas! has turned to be the truth: that the rumour of war with the Turks has been trumped up with the purpose of mulcting the Christian Population, so that being burned and crushed in all possible ways it might be all the more servile towards the tyranny of both kinds of princes’ (ecclesiastical and secular).3 Rousseau reminded us that ‘war and conquest without and the encroachment of despotism within give each other mutual support. . . . Aggressive princes wage war at least as much on their subjects as on their enemies and the conquering nation is left no better off than the conquered’.4In a famous quote, Robert Seeley stated that ‘the degree of political freedom within a state must reasonably be inversely proportional to the military and political pressures on its borders’.5Hintze alludes to this relationship when he argues that ‘notwithstanding its heavy commitment in continental war, bureaucratic centralism did not develop in Britain because its isolation meant that it did not have to raise and administer a large standing army. Its strength was based upon the navy and navies do not shape the apparatus of government as do armies’; or when he argues that ‘It is an admirable achievement of the French nation that it managed to develop militarism and administrative centralization within a parliamentary constitutional framework’.6Finer suggests that one cannot understand why French historians are so obsessed with the ‘demon’ of exit while the British are equally interested in the ‘angel’ of voice, without taking into account that France’s borders were disputed up to the Second World War, whereas Britain’s borders are more or less the same today as they were in 1975.7
3
‘Erasmus of Rotterdam’, in M. M. Phillips (ed. and trans.), The ‘Adages’ of Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1536 (1964)), 347–8.
4 Rousseau, J-. J., ‘Judgement of saint Pierre’s project for Perpetual peace’, in S.
Hoff-man and D. P. Fidler (eds.), Rousseau on International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981 (1756)), 91.
5
Quoted in Hintze, O., in G. Oestreich (ed.), Soziologie und Geschichte Staat und Verfassung (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1962), 366.
6 Ibid., 415 and 428. 7
Finer, S. E., ‘State-building, state boundaries and border control: An essay on certain aspects of the first phase of state-building in Western Europe considered in the light of the Rokkan–Hirschman model’, Social Science Information, 13 (1974), 79–126, 115.
However, this fundamental intuition is rarely spelled out with its full implications. This chapter is an attempt to remedy this, by elaborating more fully on the idea of a relationship between ‘external territorial consoli-dation’ and ‘internal political structures’. My purpose is to develop a theor-etical framework general enough to be applied to the consolidation of any type of political formation. I propose to start from the analytical discussion of the two key concepts of ‘exit’ (‘entry’) and ‘boundary’. Building on these two, the following sections of the chapter focus on the three main process of internal consolidation: the formation of the centre and its internal hierarchy; the creation of loyalties and the formation of the system; the articulation of voice and the formation of specific political structures. All these concepts are pairs that point to actors’ options and the corresponding macro features. ‘Exit/entry’, ‘loyalty’ and ‘voice’ are individual actor’s behavioural choices or attitudes, while ‘boundaries’, ‘system building’, and ‘political structuring’ represent their corresponding macro and systemic counterparts.
The core of my argument is provisionally anticipated by the scheme in Figure 1.1, that suggests how the relationships between external boundary demarcation and internal structuring can be conceptualized for any type of political formation. Thus, the scheme may be read along any of the arrows indicated. We might be primarily interested in studying how the internal centre and its hierarchical order are shaped by the combined effect of the existing boundaries and of the exit options they allow. Alternatively, we can
Exit (entry) options Internal
hierachical order/centre formation, loyalty/system building voice/political structuring External boundary building External territorial consolidation and relations
explore how the process of internal structuring of a territory is shaped by the strategy of boundary building and exit options of the internal hierarchical order. Similarly, both the boundary building and the availability of the exit options can be read as a function of the other processes. Independent and dependent variables are not fixed in this scheme. It merely signals the im-portance of the network of relationships between these factors when inter-preting the external relations and domestic structuring of any political formation. This network of relationship is the object of the analytical dis-cussion of this chapter.
As the terminology witnesses, here the impetus is provided by the work of Alfred O. Hirschman and Stein Rokkan, although I revise and adapt their views to my aims. Hirschman’s ‘Exit-Voice’ paradigm constitutes a micro theory of individual behaviour facing organizational performance on a small scale; Rokkan develops a macro theory of the confinement and configuration of actors/resources in large-scale organization such as states. Hirschman’s reasoning is primarily analytical; Rokkan’s is primarily historical. While Hirschman describes structural profiles for individual choices, Rokkan priv-ileges path dependencies in dynamic processes that constrain the same indi-vidual choices. The chapter explores how much can be gained by bridging the insights of these two great scholars.
Exit
Hirschman’s key intuition is to conceive of exit and voice as alternative individual’s reactions to the performance of the organizations and institu-tions that he/she belongs to. Hirschman establishes a negative association between the two—opportunities for exit reduce the need or willingness for voice, while their absence enhances them.8Exit and voice are thus analysed in their capacity to function as mechanisms of recovery in organizational performance. He originally thought that exit mechanisms were typical of economic transactions, while voice mechanisms were typical of political interactions, where the usual alternative to voice is acquiescence or indiffer-ence rather than exit. Exit is impersonal—it avoids costly face-to-face rela-tionships; it is communicated indirectly via statistics. Voice, as an attempt to change an objectionable state of affairs rather than to escape from it, is not a private and secret act but requires the expression of critical opinions through personal involvement—it is direct and visible, and it exposes the ‘voicer’.9
8 Hirschman, A. O., Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms,
Organiza-tions, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
9
Ibid., 15–16, 24. Hirschman concludes that in all organizations: ‘for competition to work as a mechanism of recuperation from performance lapses, it is generally best to have
Although in successive writings Hirschman increasingly appraises the role of voice, in a first approximation, voice is viewed as a residual of exit. Those who do not exit are candidates for voice; voice feeds on either inelastic demand (i.e. slowness in exit when deterioration occurs), or on lack of opportunity for exit. Therefore, the role of voice increases as the opportunity for exit declines, to the point where, ‘with exit wholly unavailable, voice must carry the entire burden of alerting management to its failing’.10Therefore, the choice of whether or not to voice will be made in light of the prospect for an effective use of exit. In other words, exit and voice are alternatives.11 While in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Hirschman regarded exit as essentially costless when it was available, he later briefly discussed the potential costs of exit even in situations in which loyalty is absent.12 Such costs, which are not evident in consumers’ choices, become more obvious for interindus-try transactions (trust, traditions, etc.) and are crucial in all forms of terri-torial exit.
This brief outline highlights the immense potential of Hirschman’s con-cepts, and, at the same time, their limitations when applied outside and beyond the frame of reference of the modern territorial state, a frame which he takes for granted in his early work and only partially revises in its later studies. To apply his conceptualization to any historical form of organ-ization (or, more precisely, to any form of political arena—see infra for this concept) some further developments and modification are necessary.
Hirschman’s main reference point is always that of the individual and his/ her exit opportunities within state organizations. In fact, he defines ‘stateless’ as a situation associated with the regular practice and possibility of physical
a mixture of alert and inert customers’, with alert customers providing the information on the decline of the product; and the inert customer preventing this decline from having immediate and catastrophic effects with no possibility of recovery for the firm. He also applies the same reasoning to the state: ‘Every state . . . requires for its establishment and existence some limitations or ceilings on the extent of exit or of voice or of both. In other words, there are levels of exit (disintegration) and voice (disruption) beyond which it is impossible for an organization to exist as an organization. At the same time, an organiza-tion needs minimal or floor levels of exit and voice in order to receive the necessary feedback about its performance’; Hirschman, A. O., ‘Exit, voice, and loyalty: further reflections and a survey of recent contributions’, in A. O. Hirschman (ed.), Essays in Trespassing. Eco-nomics to Politics and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 213–35, 224–5 (originally in Social Science Information, 13 (1974), 7–26). This line of Hirschman’s reasoning is not directly relevant in this context.
10
Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, 34.
11
That those people who are less likely to exit are more likely to voice has some empirical underpinning. See Orbell, J. M. and Uno, T., ‘A Theory of Neighbourhood Problem Solving: Political Action vs. Residential Mobility’, American Political Science Review, 66 (1972), 471–89. His results suggest that differential distribution of exit options has a bearing also on the differential options of voice.
12
exit, and views this as the cause of the non-emergence of large, centralized societies with specialized state organs. That is, the availability of exit options prevents the formation of modern states, since this process depends on the limiting of those exits.13Even when he deals with exit from and voice for public goods, the question is whether to exit or to voice within state organ-izations. While exiting from an organization providing private goods termin-ates the relationship, in the case of public goods the member can stop being a producer but cannot stop being a consumer. Calculations therefore become more complex and involve evaluating the cost of voice from within (remain-ing a producer of public goods) or of voice from outside (exit public good producing organizations but continuing to voice about best public goods). The customer who exits public goods production cannot avoid caring about their quality as he/she is always subject to their consumption. Actually, he/ she may be persuaded not to exit in order to prevent further deterioration of the product quality. Hirschman is rarely concerned with other units of exit than the individual member (firms, corporations, territories) because they imply exit from the state, something that he tends to see in the classic terms of migration and secession:14‘Exit is ordinarily unthinkable, though not always wholly impossible, from such primordial human groupings as family, tribe, church, and state.’15
The alternative between exit from within-state organizations, on the one hand, and migration and secession from the state, on the other hand, is too radical if we want to broaden the theoretical framework to include all forms of political formations and political arenas, including, therefore, political formations that are different from the national-welfare democratic state, preceding or following it. The current situation whereby economic transac-tions and new informatics and communication technologies are increasingly internationalized offers new opportunities for exit to goods, services, ideas, messages, fashions, etc. as well as to the corresponding organizational units for their production. Cultural homogeneity and economic control of the state’s membership space can thus be consolidated only with difficulty given the current technologies of instant satellite communications, fax, net-work of computers, etc. In the light of this, it is interesting to apply Hirsch-man’s conceptualization to the grey area of exit options that now lie between the two extreme and clear-cut cases: that is, to those exit options that mean
13
Hirschman, ‘Exit, Voice and the State’, World Politics, 31 (1978), 90–107; reprinted in Hirschman, Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond, 246–65, from which I quote 250–1.
14 See Hirschman, ‘Exit, Voice and the State’, 249: ‘The exit concept could, of course,
be extended to cover cases of this sort. I shall, however, limit myself here to situations in which physical moving away of individuals or groups is an essential characteristic of the splitting up process’.
15
neither total withdrawal from organizational membership nor full territorial mobility (although they do depend on the increasing possibility of these options). These are thus ‘partial’ forms of exit, to be added to the ‘total’ forms. In total exits—leaving a territory, seceding from a state, abandoning a membership organization, or stopping buying a good—everything is simul-taneously withdrawn in one act. However, as pointed out above, we also need to conceive of ‘partial exits’. Within certain governmental arenas there might exist or develop particular functional or spatial immunities into which the individual/corporation/group/territory can withdraw. Historically, an ex-ample of this is the ‘sanctuary’ exit, the fugitive who is safe at the altar of the church, or the Commune in the Middle Ages. There might also be a selective withholding of functions or duties de facto or on an institutional basis (military service, fiscal obligations, ‘opting out’). This is not new either. Traditionally, certain regions were exempted from military services (North-ern Ireland in the Second World War) or enjoyed extensive exception from taxation (e.g. Aragon as compared with Castilia in the Spanish Kingdom). Moreover, for a long time, various communes and provinces, and certain ‘orders’ or ‘classes’, enjoyed exemption from taxation as territorial or func-tional islands.
Table 1.1 presents a typology of exit opportunities based on the differences between public and private goods16and the distinctions between production
Table 1.1. Types of exit and consequences
Private goods Public goods
Production Exit production of private goods: Exit production of public goods: Relevant for internal political
exchanges
Relevant for internal political exchanges: free riding and resource holder withholding Consumption Exit consumption of private goods: Exit consumption of public
goods: Impossible to transfer on territorial
consumers the costs of the production of specific regulations, protections, allocations, etc.
Access to the production of alternative public goods outside the territory or de-territorialized
Consequences for the territorialized political production
16
In this context the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ goods refers to the source of the production (public authorities versus private actors or taxation versus contract) rather than to the nature of the consumption (exclusiveness and publicity).
and consumption. The four boxes yielded by the cross-tabulation describe a wider set of exits than the total exits discussed above. Voluntary exit from the production of private goods (top-left cell) takes the temporary form of subtracting resources from the local production process, usually with the goal of exercising pressures on either social counterparts or public author-ities. Strikes and lookouts are the most obvious forms. These (temporary) exits are significant for the outcomes of the within-territory political ex-changes. They are aimed at improving one actor’s terms of exchange by inflicting damages and reducing advantages to partners and political authorities.
Exit from the production of those public goods (top-right cell) that are based on voluntary participation also has considerable consequences for internal political exchanges as it can modify the balance of mobilization resources among politically relevant actors such as pressure groups, parties, and social movements. In many individual cases it takes the form of free riding. It can also take the form of (temporarily) withholding of resources necessary to establish negotiated orders between social partners and the political authority, in all those cases in which the participation of the social partners is necessary to establish and implement such agreements. Exit from the production of public goods based on compulsory participation—like taxation, duties, and obligations—is normally made very difficult by strong legal sanctions.17
The most interesting consequences are visible in the exit options from the consumption of private and public goods. Exit from the consumption of a given private good is the normal operating principle of the market. However, in a context in which the territorial economic boundaries are low and exit technology in the market and acquisition activities high (credit cards, mail order, e-commerce, de-territorialized service provision, etc.), exit from terri-torially produced and distributed private goods may have important reper-cussions on the ‘political production’ of a polity.18 In principle the entire income generated on a given territory can be used by buying goods and services directly in different territories. This impinges on the capacity of the internal hierarchy to transfer the costs of production of territorially specific regulations, protections, allocations, jurisdictions and arbitrations—which are charged on the goods/services produced and distributed in the territory— on local and territorially confined consumers. In other words, it makes it impossible to charge local customers with those political costs within the
17 Exiting from the production of a public good financed by general taxation is
impos-sible even where one does not consume such good. Resorting to private schools and health care does not exempt one from financing these public services.
18
I use this term in the sense given to it by Stoppino, M., Potere e teoria politica (Milano: Giuffre´, 2001). See later for a more extensive discussion of it.
polity that can be avoided by selecting functional equivalent private goods produced under different (lower) production costs. This generates a situation of territorial institutional competition among different systems of political production.
Finally, the most unusual and challenging type of exit involves the capacity for individuals and their resources to withdraw (and to subtract themselves) from the consumption of particular public goods. In the ideal type model of the modern (nation-) state, this is unconceivable. One can decide not to vote, but cannot avoid consuming the decision of the elected officials, the security provided by the state, the credential control of professional orders and educational institutions, or the jurisdiction of territorial courts. Equally, one cannot opt out of the redistributive social obligations that are embedded into the national social security and welfare systems. The territorial sover-eignty of the state is represented by its ability to exclude alternative authority sources over its territory and, therefore, alternative public goods. This is, however, exactly the field in which recent developments have started to change the picture and we should not rule out the possibility of various types of actors—individuals, organizations, firms and even territories—con-suming public goods that are not produced in the territory without necessar-ily abandoning that territory physically. In particular, we need to acknowledge the growing possibility of accessing external resources in the forms of (a) external regulations, (b) external jurisdiction, and (c) external material allocations.
The possible consequences of the capacity to exit the consumption of territorial public goods are considerable. Access to alternative non- or extra-territorial public goods reduces the incentive to participate in the production of both voluntary and compulsory territorial public goods. Moreover, as with the exit from the consumption of private goods, the exit from the consumption of territorial public goods generates pressures on the territorial political production. This production increasingly needs to con-sider the preferences of those who are dissatisfied on account of being forced to continue to support the production of public goods that they do not consume. In short, exit from the consumption of private and public goods affects the extent to which the state can extract resources for building/main-taining territorial solidarities, and the extent to which the political system can spread such resources to its weaker and peripheral strata, sectors and territories.
Once the analytical possibility is acknowledged of opting out of the con-sumption of public goods without necessarily moving physically, a new set of behavioural options is opened up to domestic actors. Table 1.2 synthesizes these. In a situation of territorial closure, actors cannot exit from the state and their choices concern the possibility of withholding the resources they
control on a temporary basis. The aim is to inflict damages on and to reduce returns to other actors, so as to obtain the best terms in internal political exchanges in terms of social obligations and public goods consumption. The only alternative is a total exit option, by means of which actors withdraw themselves and the resources that they control, via secession, migration and delocation, with the aim of escaping their territorial social obligations and public goods consumption. The new possibility of consuming (regulative, jurisdictional and allocation) public goods across territorial units instead introduces a non-physical ‘partial exit’ that allows at least some margin for the selective choice of alternative social obligations. Resources are no longer necessarily withheld temporarily or withdrawn definitely, but can ‘behave’ as customers of competing public goods.
Table 1.2. Exits within, outside, and across territories
Key actors Inside territorial political units Outside territorial political units Across territorial political units Actors/resources withholding Actors/resources physical withdrawing Actors/resources competition Territories Fiscal, competence,
administrative, and implementation resources
Secession Access cross-territorial resources (material, regulative, and jurisdictional) Avoid unfavourable social obligations and public goods consumption Individuals Social hiding (tax
evasion, black market and shadow economy, etc.), striking, disobeying, abstaining Migration As above Resources Investments, commodities, labour, skills Delocation As above
Aim To extol the best term in internal political exchanges in terms of social obligations and public goods consumption
To escape territorial social obligations and public goods consumption To selectively choose social obligations and alternative public goods consumption
The final point of this section concerns the differential distribution of the opportunities to exit. Exit is an individual actor choice, but its cost varies and, therefore, not all actors have the same possibilities and opportunities for exit. This leaves open the possibility that the dissatisfied-mobiles—those who might exit—make the organization particularly sensitive to their needs, and, indeed, so much so that the organization tries to anticipate the course of action that will most likely prevent their exit. Moreover, the options of some will probably have impact on the options of the others, and exit choices may well provoke reactions of voice in those who do not possess or who do not want to use this option. Inequality of exit, together with its consequences for organizational performance, can thus also be seen as a source of conflict within a given organization. In many cases, how much exit is permitted from an organization is a controversial internal issue concerning the extent to which the organization can or should control its membership boundaries. Growing and unequally distributed exit options may be the basis for conflicts among those who want to restrict those options and those who want to open them up. The former realize that the options of the latter (a) are precluded to them; (b) increase the internal resources of the potential exiters beyond their capacity to voice; and, last but not least, (c) considerably reduce the resources and possibilities for the success of internal voice by materially subtracting the resources necessary for responding to it. For example, the quality of school-ing in suburbs is affected when the richer and most highly educated citizens leave, not only because those schools lose the most likely vocal defenders of quality standards, but also because they may lose the material resources through which a certain qualitative standard was guaranteed to those who could not otherwise afford it.
At the abstract level, the discussion of the differential individual options for exit cannot progress any further. In concrete situations, the chances of exit are defined by specific mechanisms and techniques of boundary building, which are macro features of the system external to the individual’s choice. Institutional barriers to exit are set at all levels of social organization and justified on various grounds, from improving efficiency to guaranteeing professional credentials, to defending useful social institutions, and even to stimulating voice in deteriorating, although recoverable organizations which would be prematurely destroyed through free exit. We therefore need to develop a theory of institutional boundary building, without which the discussion of the differential distribution of exit options remains fairly specu-lative. Boundaries define the configuration of the individual actors and resources ‘locked in’ a given territorial polity. Following the discussion so far, I define the process of ‘locking in’ as the obligation to consume territorial public goods in the forms of allocation, regulation, protection, jurisdiction and arbitration.
Boundary
Rokkan was strongly influenced by Hirschman’s simple concepts, and he used the exit/voice paradigm to interpret different waves of European state formation since the sixteenth century. For him, exit was crucial for the resourceful set of cities and small territorial states in the Central European ‘city-belt’, which successfully resisted incorporation into broader territorial systems until the nineteenth century (see Chapter 2). Rokkan thus applies the exit paradigm to the formation of territorial units within Europe, to prob-lematize the division of territories into ‘units’, and to probprob-lematize state boundaries (which Hirschman does not do). The exit-voice mechanism is primarily (but not exclusively, as will be shown below) applied to the study of territorial social systems, that is systems that are limited in their membership and codes of interaction within spatially identifiable boundaries. He uses the concept of boundary to unpack the historical formation of the ‘state’.19The concept of ‘boundary’ can be seen as the macro equivalent of the individu-alistic concept of ‘exit’. In fact, each choice for exit (or entry, of course) always implies the transcendence of some barrier and entry into some other entity. Exit is the transfer of a component part from one system to another. At the most general level, exit is always the crossing of an established boundary.
The English language has three terms to indicate a line of demarcation: ‘frontier’, ‘border’ and ‘boundary’.20The term ‘frontier’ reflects the experi-ence of the nation-state most directly, indicating the line where different jurisdictions meet, and it is characterized by the demarcations signals such as customs, police, and military personnel. The term ‘border’ also points to a territorial line of demarcation and the narrow zone around it. However, in American English, border is usually utilized to refer to international fron-tiers. ‘Boundary’ is regarded as the narrowest of the three, conveying the meaning of a line of demarcation, even if this is sometimes internal to the state. In short, the three terms can be regarded, and are often used, as synonymous. I will, however, follow an alternative line of reasoning, attrib-uting to ‘boundary’ the broadest possible analytical meaning of indicating any demarcation line between territorial or membership groups (and this
19
Rokkan, S., State Formation, Nation Building, and Mass Politics in Europe. The theory of Stein Rokkan, ed. P. Flora with S. Kuhnle and D. Urwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 343. He also outlines a distinction between ‘primary exit’ and ‘secondary exit’ (103). Primary exit refers to early innovation, while secondary exit refers to the concrete spreading of opportunities and alternatives for individuals.
20
For a discussion of these three terms see Anderson, M., Frontiers. Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 9–10.
would seem to be in line with Rokkan’s usage, even though he never offered any clear definition of the term). On this view, the term boundary is used to indicate the focal point for the delimitation of a territory or of a group; in other words, boundaries identify both territorial groups and membership groups. For instance, an economic boundary defines an area of free market transactions (economic rights, property rights, exchange options, productive factors’ mobility, common currency); a cultural boundary defines spaces characterized by the traits of the inhabitants membership group (national, ethnic, linguistic, racial, etc.); a politico-administrative boundary delimits the territory on the basis of the regulatory regimes (politico-social rights, educa-tion, labour market, etc.); a coercion or military boundary delimits the territory on the basis of the extraction-coercion agency and capacity. In this work, the term border will be used to indicate the actual physical frontier of historical states.
The crucial consequence of this definition is the following: a border can delimit a territory that is characterized by specific, distinctive and coinciding economic, cultural, administrative and coercion boundaries. On the contrary, a border can also define a territory whose boundaries are blurred, overlapping with those of other territories, and/or disjointed from one another.
In an individualistic perspective, exit is the act of transcending a boundary. All potential forms of mobility bring with them the constant threat of exit, as well as the development of pressures to contain movements within boundar-ies. The building of boundaries sets the costs and payoffs of barriers for various types of transactions across local communities, membership groups, organizations, and territorial entities. In this way, at the systemic macro level, boundaries ‘lock in’ crucial resources and actors within the system and determine the internal configuration of politically relevant resources. Boundaries are ‘locking-in mechanisms’ that increase the cost of exit and set differential incentives to stay within the system. These locking-in mechan-isms can affect actors’ economic interests and corresponding instrumental calculations when they impinge upon the material costs of exit. They can also affect actors’ identities and solidarities (and the corresponding institutions) when they impinge upon the cultural costs of exit. They can, moreover, affect actors’ safety and integrity when they impinge upon administrative, coercion and violent impositions. As a result, every strategy for the differential control of boundaries has consequences for the configuration of the political re-sources inside each territory/group. Through the concept of ‘boundary’ we can set up the linkage between strategies of external control and internal political developments, between the collectivization of territories (and groups) and the development of hierarchies for their defence.
In his historical and empirical work, Rokkan refers primarily to external territorial boundaries. However, he also extends this conceptualization to the
